Research news

Situated on the coast of present-day Lebanon, the ancient Phoenician city-state of Sidon was in the middle of the crossfire between the Persians, Greeks and Egyptians. A small lump of metal became an important part of their political and economic balancing act.

The provenance of the Nag Hammadi Codices has been a point of contention among scholars ever since they were discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945. A new book strongly supports the hypothesis that they were manufactured and read by Christian monks in the fourth and fifth centuries.

The faculty of Theology has launched two new major research projects. Both aims to shed new light over the distinct version of protestant religion in the Nordic countries and its relation to society at large.

Being raised in a Christian family, I used to believe the story of Easter was simple – that three days after Jesus was crucified, he rose from the dead, met his disciples in person, and commissioned them to preach the gospel to the whole world. But when I began to study the history of the ancient church, I was surprised to learn that the biblical accounts of Jesus’ resurrection were not only far more complicated than the story I learned as a child, but even differed from one another.

The texts of the Nag Hammadi codices have commonly been treated as mere witnesses to Gnostic texts in Greek mainly from the second and third centuries. A new research project will now challenge this approach by interpreting the Coptic texts of these codices within the context of their probable production and use in fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monasticism.